Re: polysynthetic languages

Peter Bleackley wrote:

> Staving Chris Bates:
>
>> Five words of an isolating language with strict word order, and saying
>> that only one of them is stressed? If stress is the only difference
>> between an isolating and a polysynthetic language then it seems like the
>> distinction is over emphasized.
>
>
> I'm planning Magzhelyagon to be a largely fusional polysynthetic
> language,
> which its rather strange kitchen sink phonology allows. So, for example,
> the word for tiger, with the tone pattern for the intransitive subject
> singular and the stop to prenasalised stop consonant mutation that
> indicates the dubious evidentiality, followed by the word for fast, with
> the tone pattern for the present tense, an intensifying trill, a click to
> indicate motion towards speaker, and the fricative to lateral fricative
> mutation for the certain evidentiality, would express in two words
> "Something that may be a tiger is definitely coming towards me very
> quickly."
>
> Pete
>
Point taken. It seems more... joined if there are the morphemes affect
each other a lot... ie fuse together, or there's vowel harmony, or
insertion of consonants to make them join better (a la Turkish and
French). But if a language is poly synthetic and very agglutinative
rather than fusional, it still seems like it wouldn't that be difficult
to make an argument to classify the language as isolating rather than
polysynthetic if you wanted to.
 BTW, your lang sounds just a little evil... which isn't bad of course.
:) Has anyone come up with that universal breaking language yet?

Chris.

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